Digital Core Design, the world-famous design laboratory in Bytom, Poland, has developed the world's first processor made of graphene - the BYT-ON.

Digital Core Design, the world-famous design laboratory in Bytom, Poland, has developed the world’s first processor made of graphene – the BYT-ON.

Discovered in 2004, graphene is an allotrope of carbon. Its structure is one-atom-thick planar sheets of carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice. Graphene differs from most conventional materials. Intrinsic graphene is a semi-metal or zero-gap semiconductor. The E-k relation is linear for low energies near the six corners of the two-dimensional hexagonal Brillouin zone, leading to zero effective mass for electrons and holes. Due to this linear dispersion relationship at low energies, electrons and holes near these six points behave like relativistic particles described by the Dirac equation for spin 1/2 particles.

The end result is that graphene-based conductors can transport electronic signals at relativistic speeds, while graphene-based transistors can switch many orders of magnitude faster than their conventional silicon-based counterparts, all while consuming minimal power. In fact, graphene is such an amazing material that the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester "For groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".

Use of graphene in Digital Core Design’ BYT-ON processor represents a breakthrough in electronics. The traditional silicon structure used to build conventional integrated circuits has been replaced with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. “We commenced our tests just before the end of 2011, and the results far exceeded our expectations,” notes Tomasz Cwienk, the spokesman for Digital Core Design. "We replaced the existing processor in one of the newest tablets available on the market with our graphene-based BYT-ON processor. We knew that the BYT-ON’s power-consumption was going to be minimal, but we were amazed to discover that the tablet ran all the way from the beginning of January 2012 until the end of March 2012 – three full months – without our having to recharge the battery.”

These revolutionary results were possible due to the combination of the Digital Core Design’s proprietary architecture (which is the outcome of 12 years of the company’s experience) and the graphene itself, which opens new possibilities for the electronic industry. The architecture implemented in the BYT-ON processor is called CISKoRISK 2nd Generation – it performs all operations with speeds reaching up 99.13% the speed of light, while maintaining 99.85% lower power consumption than conventional silicon-based equivalents.

Editor’s Note:The rumor on the streets is that the world’s top ten FPGA vendors are already in secret consultations with Digital Core Design with regard to the application of the BYT-ON’s underlying graphene transistor structure as the basis for next-generation FPGAs. One tremendous advantage of this technology for FPGA applications is that memory cells (including configuration cells) constructed out of graphene transistors switch orders of magnitude faster than SRAM, have orders of magnitude higher density than DRAM, and the non-volatility of Flash, all while consuming almost zero power.Furthermore, graphene-based transistorsare immune to radiation events, making this technology ideal for aerospace applications including deep-space probes.

If you found this article to be interest, visitMicrocontroller / MCU Designline where – in addition to my blogs on all sorts of "stuff" (also check out my Max's Cool Beans blog) – you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to all aspects of designing and using microcontrollers.

Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for my weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).

Last but certainly not least, make sure you check out all of the discussions and other information resources at MicrocontrollerCentral.com, including blogs by yours truly.

I just heard back from an unidentified underling for Lattice Semiconductor, speaking on condition of anonymity. The following is his (or her) direct quote:
“Well, it’s always something, isn’t it? Really, there’s only so much technology one can evaluate in any given day before one is just exhausted. So, while we can neither confirm nor deny any rumors linking grapheme-based FPGAs and Lattice, we can categorically state that we may or may not look into it further. Or not.”
Well, that seems to be fairly conclusive to me ... there's obviously a coverup going on ... what do you think?

I'm taking everything I read today, including the weather forecast, with a grain of low sodium salt.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte 2 of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour...
Happy April 1! If it's still on the market tomorrow I'll buy it.

I can understand the confusion and misinformation regarding the BYT-ON. It's still a pretty new technology. In fact, it's so new that I'm surprised they have it ready to ship. I've been expecting the company to first ship the BYT-ME version.

Here's what they say on the website:
No matter how you call it - Prima Aprilis, April Fools’ Day, All Fools’ Day, Aprilscherz, Jour du poisson d’avril or Hunt the gowk Day - thank you for your sense of humour and thank you that you took our joke.
yours sincerely, DCD Team
These guys do IPs not physical chips...

"No matter how you call it - Prima Aprilis, April Fools’ Day, All Fools’ Day, Aprilscherz, Jour du poisson d’avril or Hunt the gowk Day - thank you for your sense of humor and thank you that you took our joke.
yours sincerely, DCD Team"
Straight from the Digital Core Design Website (http://www.dcd.pl/) This was a joke. In my opinion a bad one :P

I thought it was pretty clever actually -- before I posted it I did a search and couldn't find anyone else who had come up with anything similar.
I still remember the days of the classic "Write-Only Memory (WOM)" and the "Black Noise Generator"

I read an article in Discover Magazine years and years ago about small rodents that lived in the antarctic and burrowed through the ice and snow using a hotspot on their heads to melt it away.
They were supposed to be small but incredibly vicious. The article suggested that large numbers of these creatures may have been responsible for the disappearance of some explorers.
They showed pictures and everything
It was only last year that I discovered that it was an April's Fool Day spoof...
Now my mind is churning for something I can come up with myself for next year ... I have a cunning plan ...

99.13% of the speed of light. Switching at relativistic speeds. Too bad they did not unveil the revolutionary networking technology they are working on for the military. Based on wormhole tunelling neutrinos, this can achieve petabytes per second, with virtually zero delay.
- Jonny